1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to user-interfaces for computer systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to a system that uses a zooming effect to provide additional display space for managing applications.
2. Related Art
Advances in communications and computing technology have led to dramatic changes in the way and the frequency with which people access information, and have led to an expectation that data should be accessible anywhere and at any time via a wide variety of devices. As a result, devices such as portable computers, as well as mobile phones, PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), and car navigation systems, have grown to become increasingly sophisticated. While such devices have previously supported only a limited number of applications executing serially, they have evolved to accommodate a larger number of applications, with multiple applications running concurrently.
Most applications typically include user-interface (UI) elements which are displayed on the screen of a device, such as a launch icon to start an application, a text field or a thumbnail that represents a running application, or the main visual UI of the running application (e.g., a display window). Because device screen sizes are usually limited, users desiring to select from a large number of applications and to run multiple applications simultaneously on a single device need an efficient way to manage the multiple applications. However, existing UI approaches typically obscure large portions of the display, or do not provide a rich enough set of functionality. Attempts to address such issues in turn often require significant input to browse through selections. Furthermore, existing approaches do not support actions that act on every item in a set of task-related applications.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus that remedies the above-described user-interface problems for devices.